ABSTRACT
Illustrated with etchings by Jessica Greenman, Alice Oswald's collection Weeds and Wild Flowers offers a focal point for theorizing botanical humour in the dialectic terms central to Plants in Contemporary Poetry. Oswald's collection mediates the native-naturalized binary by disrupting rigid distinctions such as these. The poet-gardener's weeds and wildflowers form a pantheon of amusing plant-beings. Disclosing the abilities of plants and mediating indigenous-exotic oppositions, Weeds and Wild Flowers evokes the potential of poetry to act as a mechanism for coming to terms with the decline and disappearance of local flora. In Weeds and Wild Flowers, botanical humour and the comical plant find their completest expression within Oswald oeuvre to date. Greenman's inscription of the whole poem on the facing page concretizes Oswald's assertion that "flowers are recognisably ourselves elsewhere". In other words, poems and flowers partake in a florid energy; each diversifies rhizomatically while maintaining internal coherence and autopoietic self-determination.
